A grand piano (www.metmuseum.org).
by Dan Burns
Jul 31, 2021, 12:30 PM

MN lege: How did the DFL get a decent budget to happen?

Not a great one, by any means, especially in the matter of making the thieving, greedhead plutocrats start to pay up. Actual budgets are never great from a progressive standpoint, which is no reason not to keep trying. But there is plenty of investment in the state to like, even if some of the increases will be eaten up by ordinary inflation. How did that happen, given where the Party of Trump is at, these days, and that it unfortunately controls the Minnesota Senate?

From the very beginning of the pandemic, right-wingers in the state have been ranting about Gov. Tim Walz’s use of emergency powers to try to protect the state’s people – including those who are not at all intelligent and knowledgeable about what “pandemic” really means. It hardly matters whether Minnesota’s GOP “leadership” really understood the seriousness of the virus, or were just cynically looking for political gain. Given that GOP “leadership” everywhere really has degenerated to mostly rather repugnant people just interested in personal power, and in revenge on the “liberals” they blame for everything that’s not perfect in their own lives (beats taking a good, hard, honest look in the mirror, you know), probably some of both.

That part about blaming and revenge also applies to the Trumper right in general. Maybe they’re simply incapable of detached objectivity, maybe not, but in either case they certainly never remotely try to apply it in their politics and worldviews. Rather, everything is very, very personal.

My take (which I emphasize yet again is never presented as any kind of claim to absolute, unarguable, universal truth) is that Gov. Walz was able to play on the GOP’s obsession with his emergency powers – which he finally did give up, after it no longer mattered – to extract far more than he should have, from any kind of conservative, limited-government perspective. In other words, he and DFL legislative leaders were able to use the wingnuts’ irrational, personal obsessions, to play those losers like a grand piano.

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